


Of All the Bars in the World (There Are None Between Us)

by almaasi



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, One Shot, Prison, Romance, Sharing a Bed, basically they cuddled that one time and they wanna do it again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-07
Updated: 2013-07-07
Packaged: 2017-12-17 22:47:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almaasi/pseuds/almaasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's prison cell is a small and lonely place. His cellmate, Castiel, knows that doesn't have to be so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of All the Bars in the World (There Are None Between Us)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by dialogue lifted shamelessly from _Arrested Development_.

Sam Winchester’s boots skimmed the layer of grit on the mottled floor, footfalls low and heavy as he made his way down the channel between prison cells. The guard went ahead of him, her fat shoulders skewing the stitches of her uniform as she raised her arm to tap her baton at the cells they passed. Sam inhaled a rush of chilly air each time the guard’s forearm cut intermittently across his path. She said nothing, only peered sharply into every cell.

Sam could see the prisoner inside the fifth cell, and the man looked up from his lone card game. Their eyes locked as Sam kept his steps in sync with the guard. Simple curiosity spread across the prisoner’s face, and Sam gave a nod of greeting, recognising the man Dean had once referred to as Tiny. Tiny nodded back, a friendly twinkle in his eyes.

“Winchester!” the guard bellowed, clattering her baton down another cell’s bars. “You’ve got a visitor.”

Sam turned to the cell directly on his left as the guard stopped walking. Dean was curled against the far wall, his orange jumpsuit in obvious contrast to the smeared grey concrete of the walls. Dean ended his conversation with his cellmate, who smiled easily as Dean glanced away from him.

As Dean’s eyes met Sam’s, both brothers beamed.

“Sammy,” Dean said, scrambling to stand up as fast as possible. Sam chuckled and stood closer to the bars, curling a hand around the shockingly cold metal.

“You got ten minutes,” the guard said, her dull voice rough and uncaring. “No touching.”

“What, not even a hug?” Dean cried after her, feigning upset, but in Sam’s experience, Dean was a sucker for hugs, so by all rights, the upset was a double bluff.

The fact that Dean snorted at the guard’s turned back, then reached through the bars to clasp Sam’s hand and give it a firm squeeze, said a lot about why Dean was behind bars in the first place.

Dean withdrew his hands with a sigh, a smile still playing on his lips. Sam felt the warmth in his gaze; Dean was always happy to see him on the few occasions it was possible, and today’s visit was not an outlier among that trend.

“You doing okay?” Sam asked, running his hand back through his long hair, trying not to let his eyes well with tears. He’d not seen his brother since the first few days he’d been locked up, and to say he missed him would be a drastic understatement.

Dean snorted. “Let’s just say, when I get out of here, don’t think any less of me if I have lung cancer.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked, like it wasn’t already obvious.

“There’s nothin’ to _do_ here.” Dean flicked his eyes towards his cellmate, then turned his back on Sam and slumped against the bars. With his face tilted towards him, Dean gave Sam an imploring look, eyes wide and lips drawn flat. He seemed to be expecting Sam to offer a ticket to carnival, by the desperate way he was looking at him.

Sam could only give a helpless shrug. Dean crossed his muscled arms, swaying his head with a frustrated noise. Sam could just about imagine his elder brother grasping a bar across the ceiling and lifting his own weight like prisoners did in the movies; Dean’s arms were about twice as thick as they’d ever been.

“Looks like you’ve found a way to chew away your time,” Sam said, the slow and pointed drag of his eyes making it clear that the solid flesh of Dean’s body looked borderline ridiculous. “How long do you spend working out, on average?”

Dean looked at his own arms and shrugged.

His cellmate tipped his chin up from the book he was reading, and muttered, “At least three hours a day.”

Dean simpered at the other man and told him to shut up.

Sam couldn’t help but smirk at Dean as he rounded back on Sam, leaning his weight forward against the bars with a hollow and distressed look in his eyes.

“I’m goin’ stir-crazy in here, Sammy,” Dean murmured, gaze set on the cell opposite. “Warden keeps us busy, makin’ clothes and shit, but I don’t even get to try on the pretty panties, and where the hell’s the fun in that?!”

Sam gaped. “I’m... going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

Dean snorted distastefully, clearly not caring what Sam heard or thought of him. “I ain’t gotten laid in a fucking month.”

Sam very carefully met Dean’s eye, failing to hold back his smile. “You’ve been in here _two_ months.”

Dean’s jaw went slack, and he turned his eyes in the direction of his cellmate. The man looked up again, the dark tufts of his hair slumping as his head moved.

Sam stood there awkwardly until the moment Dean returned his gaze, throat pulled tight, gaze scattered.

“Ye- Yeah, well, when you’re in here, it - it gets kind of hard to... gauge time.”

“I’ll bet,” Sam muttered.

Dean looked a little abashed, but said nothing else on the matter.

Castiel waited patiently as Dean spoke to his brother. Dean spoke of few other people day-to-day; Sam was family, Sam was special. Castiel kept his eyes on his book for the most part, but his attention was all on Dean’s conversation.

Sam was a beanstalk, as Dean liked to say, where Dean was just tall. Sam’s arms were toughened by the hard work of life, not by determined, boredom-motivated push-ups, and as Castiel sat, he watched Dean touch at his own arms, blunt thumb pressing into the muscle. Discomfort was edged in his stance, his feet moving as agitatedly as always.

Only at times when he spoke to Castiel did Dean stop moving about. He would sit, and he would talk, smile, share a game or two. Even when they sat quietly to read, Castiel kept a hand on Dean’s bare foot to keep it from jumping. Dean was restless, and perhaps that was the point. Prison was meant to be a miserable place.

In their short minutes together, Dean spoke to Sam mostly about how lonely he felt. For all the things Dean and Castiel conversed about, be it their families, their pasts, their loves and their crimes, Dean never mentioned such feelings. But he didn’t have to: Castiel read it in his face. A lonely man was any man between these walls.

Dean clung to Sam through the bars, weary and lonesome as the guard forbade their embrace and wrenched them apart. Dean waved his brother goodbye, blowing him a kiss from his grubby fingertips. Sam called out his farewells, but the door at the end of the hallway slammed his sentence into two: the precious, and that which would never be heard.

“He’ll visit again soon,” Castiel said, placing his book beside him and turning his body to the side of the bed, feet over the edge. “He missed you, I know he did.”

“Yeeeah,” Dean sighed, dragging out the word as he went to sit beside Castiel, his weight making the bed clunk. The orange material on their thighs brushed, the warmth of Dean now fixed to Castiel from his shoulder to his knee.

“You’re sad.”

Dean met Castiel’s eye, the green flecks in Dean’s irises almost greyed by the weak light in the cell.

“Yeah, Cas. I’m sad. I’m... Fuck, I’m real sad.”

“Why?”

Dean’s chuckle came out less than mirthful, then he turned his gaze away again. “He said I have a prison accent.”

Castiel gathered that it was meant to be a joke, but it was too flippant to be the entire truth. Castiel mostly understood Dean’s peculiar ways, and in this instance, he was covering whatever his real sadness was.

“You do sound like Benny,” Castiel admitted, glad at least to make Dean laugh.

Dean kept smiling as he leaned over his knees, hands clasped between his legs.

The sound of other prisoners rattled in echoes down the hall, as empty and pale as it always was. This place held all the worst kinds of human souls. But Castiel watched the crinkles in Dean’s eyes fade as the seconds passed, and he saw the unsaid words in Dean’s mouth. The real prison bars were no further than Dean’s own lips.

“You can say it, Dean,” Castiel encouraged. “Whatever you want to say. I’m listening.”

Dean’s eyes closed in a moment of soft affection, not looking up to meet Castiel’s eye but managing to rest a hand just above his knee, squeezing. “It’s nothin’.”

Castiel accepted it, and moved to pick up his book again. Dean’s sharp intake of breath made him stop, and instead he waited.

“Just...”

Castiel waited.

Dean’s words spilled out low, quietened, secret. “You know that night. A few weeks back.”

His hand strayed away from Castiel’s knee, shifting so Dean could hold his own hand, comforting. He continued, “When it was real dark, and the power went out in the storm, and the heater was bust, and―”

“I remember,” Castiel interrupted, having no need to have the night recounted to him. He still felt the warmth of Dean’s legs against his own, hands under his shirt, breath on his neck in the dark.

“Yeah.” Dean cleared his throat. “Yeah, well... you know that thing, that we did by accident?”

Sparks of arousal had burned bright in Castiel’s body that night, feeling human heat and the need to devour, to move his hips against the hard flesh that was resting against his own body. Dean’s sighs of want did nothing but keep him going, whimpers muffled, hands sweating and pulling each other closer.

“I remember,” Castiel said again.

Dean had moaned against Castiel’s throat, sound drowned by the falling rain, by the thunder that pounded drums on every wall, echoes of the night filling the haunted air between the prison cells.

Castiel had held him and felt his release through his clothes, heard him give a weak and honest sound, the same kind which Castiel gave himself not a minute later, with Dean’s hand around his manhood.

The churn of excitement Castiel had felt then, it still carried him through some more recent nights, his own hands being a sterile replacement for Dean’s. What they shared that night was remembered as determined but curious; knowing but innocent. New.

Dean gulped, nodding silently. “Uh-huh. Well.”

Castiel waited.

Dean’s words broke from his prison, becoming freer than he could ever be. “I want to do that again.”

Castiel was glad. He felt little else to speak of; he was satisfied with Dean for saying it, and anticipative for when it would happen. But he gave no more than a firm nod, and said, “Yes.”

Dean’s wet tongue swiped over his lips, eyelashes fluttering as he kept his gaze on the floor.

Castiel, with a smile, leaned in close. Very close. He put his lips to Dean’s ear. “When we do, may we kiss?”

Dean’s breath caught. Castiel pulled his face away only the few inches he needed to be able to see Dean nod. It was a hasty nod, nervous - but eager.

Castiel leaned in once more. “And will you hold me?”

Dean would not be lonely, if he had Castiel in his arms.

Inside the bars of this small world, there were only so many things Castiel could do for him, but so many more ways that he wanted to give. With nights no longer spent alone in separate bunks, their worlds might seem a little less small.

“Yes,” Dean breathed. “Yeah, Cas, I’ll hold you.”

Castiel moved to whisper one last thing. “After lights out, tonight.”

Because there was a storm on the way, tonight. But it was not in the sky above, not formed by the tides of the air. Sometimes storms were quiet, held back by silencing hands, their thunder no more than gasps and mewls, their lightning made up of physical pleasure, grounded by hands fisted in bedsheets.

And sometimes, storms brewed while trapped inside bottles, not prisons. Glass could break, and the storm got free.


End file.
